Mary Ann Of The Mountain
by JWood201
Summary: Sequel to "Hurricane George" and "Tornado Gilligan." Summer 1979. Mary Ann experiences life in Pennsylvania with Gilligan's family and his motley group of friends.
1. Pennsylvania

_Summer 1979._

_Sequel to "Hurricane George" and "Tornado Gilligan." Read those first – there are a lot of connections. I can't believe it's been three years since I wrote them!_

_Same backstory as those two stories, as well as "The Night Before Christmas," "At The End of The World," and some of my other stories._

_I'm out of practice, but it feels good to be back. :)_

# # # #

Mary Ann squirms uncomfortably in her chair.

She coughs. Drops her napkin.

A pair of big blue eyes is peering at her from the other side of the table. They're barely visible over their owner's plate, but they're unblinking. If the boy's bottom wasn't perched on top of three fat phone books he'd be completely invisible.

Gilligan reaches down and retrieves her napkin. He hands it back to her without looking up from his plate.

Earlier that day, Mary Ann stood on the front porch, sweating in the sweltering summer heat. The Pennsylvania humidity settled on them like a scratchy wool blanket and heat sizzled up from the blacktop in waves. She didn't want to meet Gilligan's family for the first time in her shorts, but the cute sundress she had on still seemed too stifling.

Gilligan was in front of her, fighting with suitcases, trying to free just one finger to push the doorbell without dropping any of the bags. She watched him struggle for a second, fanning herself with her purse, until he decided to bend down and ring the doorbell with his nose. He straightened up as the chimes echoed inside the house and grinned proudly at her.

But he instantly dropped all the bags into a deafening heap as soon as the door opened and his mother Kathleen screamed with happiness and pulled him into her arms and his father tried in vain to get a word in edgewise. His brother and sister grinned from inside the living room and the little boy with the bright blue eyes appeared in the doorway to peer at Mary Ann.

When Kathleen finally released him from her clutches, she turned on Mary Ann. Gilligan's brother Michael pounced on him, poking him in the ribs and pulling him into an affectionate headlock, demanding that he finally give him back his shirt.

Gilligan's mother suddenly squealed and Mary Ann flinched. "Where is it? Let me see it!" She pulled away from Mary Ann and held her by the shoulders before grabbing at her left hand. She went silent and her eyes widened as she stared at the girl's engagement ring – the four pearls Gilligan had found in the oyster bed on the island fused to a woven band. "William!" she gasped.

"He made it," Mary Ann offered as she watched Gilligan squirming under his brother's gaze.

Gilligan's sister linked her arms around his neck and leaned her cheek against his. "Willy always was the sentimental one. That's why he's Mom's favorite."

"Bridget, don't say that," their mother chided, holding Mary Ann's hand up so she could inspect the ring from different angles. "But it's true," she whispered and Mary Ann smiled.

At the table, the boy stares at her as he robotically pulls potatoes into his mouth. He eats with his fingers and his grandmother is constantly trying to shove a fork into his hand. He drops the fork onto the floor where it clatters against the others he rejected before it.

Gilligan is grinning inanely at his brother's loud babble as he eats. Gilligan's sister and her mother are ignoring Michael, preferring instead to pepper Mary Ann with questions about the island, the weather, Ginger's berry makeup, Gilligan's dating prowess, his uncharacteristically romantic proposal, the upcoming wedding, and everything else. Mary Ann could barely comprehend each question, much less answer it, before the next one descended upon her.

"I don't know how a little pipsqueak like you could land a babe like that!" Michael hollers and flashes Mary Ann his biggest grin from across the table. Gilligan looks mildly embarrassed, but smiles into his plate anyway and Michael laughs. "I'm proud of you, Will."

"Michael, stop it," his wife chides before turning to Mary Ann. "I'm sorry."

"What's a babe?" the little boy asks and his grandmother shushes him.

It's the first time Mary Ann has heard him speak all day.

# # # #

Mary Ann's voice penetrates the darkness. "Gilligan?" He grunts in reply and she smiles. "Why are you so quiet tonight?" Usually he talks a mile a minute and Mary Ann has learned to sleep through most of it.

"Sleeping," he murmurs. "My bed."

Mary Ann peers through the darkness at Gilligan, curled up in his childhood bed in his childhood room, which, like her own, was left relatively untouched. Mothers – or aunts – seem to have a sixth sense about their children's safety and Kathleen wouldn't let Michael take over the entire room or let her husband turn it into his Man Cave. Whatever that was. She was sure her son would be coming back.

The heat barely broke when the sun went down and the window is flung open as far as it will go. The room is stifling, air thick like cotton and soaked with humidity, but Gilligan doesn't seem to notice.

Mary Ann listens to the fan whirring in vain for a moment, straining against the abnormally high temperature, before she speaks again. "I don't think he likes me."

She hears Gilligan move and can faintly see him propped up on one elbow in the moonlight streaming in the open window. "Are you kidding? He likes you too much. Just wait until he starts telling everyone that you spent the night in his bed tomorrow."

Mary Ann throws a pillow at him, but laughs anyway. "No, not your brother!" Gilligan's staring at her from three feet away, propped up in his own old twin bed, but he's not laughing and Mary Ann knows that his brother has always made him a little nervous. "He's sweet, though." Mary Ann hears Gilligan harrumph as she kicks off the sheet, which in this weather feels like a heavy comforter, and flops down on her back on Michael's old bed. "I mean your nephew, Patrick."

"He takes after his father."

"He keeps looking at me funny."

"He thinks you're pretty."

"Gilligan, he's four years old."

"He told me that you're his girlfriend."

Mary Ann can't help smiling at the ceiling. "He did not."

"We're gonna have a duel about it at high noon."

"Gilligan." Mary Ann puts that edge into her voice that she knows he hates and is usually accompanied by planting her hands on her hips. "He's got that same look that you get sometimes," she continues after a moment. "Like he's trying to figure you out. It's unnerving."

"Relax, Mary Ann. You're like the Baby Whisperer."

"I am not. You are." Mary Ann sits up and peels her hair off of her neck. She pulls it into a bun and flops back down again. "What about Rebecca?" she asks, thinking of her cousin's baby girl. "She didn't leave your side the whole time we were in Kansas."

"Do you remember when we were in the grocery store a few months ago and that baby was screaming so loud the entire store could hear him?" Mary Ann nods, even though she knows he can't see her. She hears him stand up and approach her bed. "And the second you smiled at him, he stopped."

Mary Ann looks up at Gilligan; he's peering down at her and holding her pillow. "He was distracted by watching you try to balance that watermelon on your head," she says. Gilligan frowns and drops Mary Ann's pillow on her face and retreats back to his own bed. He jumps in like he's five years old, the mattress springs groaning in protest. "Don't do that," she scolds him, "You're going to break it and end up sleeping on the floor."

"Yes, Mother." Gilligan rolls his eyes and gets comfortable on the mattress. After a moment he speaks up. "Seriously, though, if we were real people and not castaways, you would've been a swell kindergarten teacher."

Mary Ann gazes across the room at Gilligan's Mosquitoes _Live at Carnegie Hall_ poster, the white background glowing in the moonlight. It's the same as the one on her wall in Kansas thousands of miles away. They must've hung them up around the same time, long before they even met.

"Your sister's the oldest, right, Gilligan?"

"Yeah."

"But she doesn't have any kids."

"Nope."

"Your mom's been eyeing me up and down all day and Mike's wife never stopped talking about how badly Patrick needs someone to play with."

"After we get married we're gonna have two to three kids and a dog, remember?"

"Yeah. I remember."

Mary Ann hears him roll over in the darkness and his voice sounds closer now, like it's directed straight at her and not the ceiling. "Then what's the matter?"

Mary Ann sighs and the few bangs that aren't stuck to her forehead rise into the air. "I don't know. I guess I'm just worried."

"About what? Kids are fun." Gilligan sits up on the edge of the bed and watches her.

"I don't know. What if it's hard or what if something happens or what if I can't?"

Gilligan shrugs. "We haven't tried." He says it so innocently and Mary Ann's heart swells for a moment. "Why are you so upset about it all of a sudden?" When she doesn't say anything in response, Gilligan gets up and wanders to the window. He kneels down on the floor and rests his arms on the sill. The moonlight bathes his face in a dull yellow glow and the breeze ruffles his hair. "I think it's hotter in here than it is outside," he says and leans forward to stick his head out the window.

After a moment he feels Mary Ann come up behind him. She kneels down beside him and nudges him with her shoulder. "Shove over, sailor." Mary Ann crosses her arms on the windowsill next to him. She gazes out over the backyard, at the perfectly manicured lawn, at the flowering shrubs lining the property. The old metal swing set with a fresh coat of red paint disappears in the darkness, save but for the dull creak of the swing chains as they sway in the breeze.

"Is that why your sister doesn't have any kids?" she asks, closing her eyes to the breeze.

Mary Ann feels Gilligan shrug beside her. "I don't know."

They're quiet for a long time, listening to the breeze and the bats in the woods behind the house and the swing chain moving in the darkness. Gilligan is suddenly on his feet, squeezing himself through the open window and is gone in an instant.

"What are you doing?!"

"Come up!" His voice floats down from above, but he's out of sight. Mary Ann leans out the window and twists around. Gilligan is on the roof, peering down at her as he grips the metal gutter in both hands. "Come on."

"Gilligan, get back in here!"

"No, you come up here!"

"I will not!"

"Come on, it's easy. It's like when we'd climb trees on the island. I'll pull you up."

Mary Ann glares at him. "No." She disappears back inside Gilligan's bedroom.

"Okay, fine." He grins. "Chicken."

Gilligan counts to three and right on cue, Mary Ann's head reappears. She turns around and slides out onto the windowsill. She grabs the gutter and stands, her bare feet gripping the painted wood. Gilligan grabs her under the arms and effortlessly lifts her onto the roof beside him.

She plops down next to him and pushes her hair out of her eyes. "You used to do this a lot, didn't you?"

Gilligan grins. "Yeah. I came up here to look at the stars." He looks up and cranes his neck, peering into the sky. "There's a lot more light pollution now. I can barely see anything."

Gilligan and Mary Ann sit in silence. Despite the heat radiating off the shingles beneath them, it's much cooler on the roof, the breeze much stronger, and the moonlight much prettier. Mary Ann scoots closer to Gilligan and links her arm through his. "You really think I'd be a good kindergarten teacher?"

"Uh huh. 'Cause you're nice and patient and you'd get to wear those crazy sweaters for every holiday." Mary Ann lays her head on his shoulder is almost asleep when he suddenly speaks again. "How am I supposed to beat a four year old in a duel?"

Mary Ann laughs. "You can't."

Gilligan puffs his chest out. "But I have to defend my woman's honor. After all, she's kind of a babe."


	2. The Beach Bus

Mary Ann shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

It's still hot. Sweltering, even. This is a record heat wave for this part of the country and even after spending fifteen years on a tropical island, this feels unbearable. Mary Ann opens the window to her right, but it only seems to make it worse as a cloud of stuffy humid air puffs through the opening and nearly suffocates her.

The bus hits a pothole and she yelps as she's bounced nearly a foot in the air, her bare legs ripping from the plastic seat. She lands roughly and nearly slides to the floor, but grabs the seat with one hand and Gilligan's arm with the other and hauls herself back up. No one else seems to notice the disruption. They're used to the jostling, anticipating it even, bracing their feet against the floor or their palms against the windows. Florence Oppenheimer has this move where she stands up a little and then floats daintily back to her seat when the danger's passed.

Mary Ann never had to take a school bus like this one. A big yellow monstrosity that's about as American as apple pie with grimy plastic upholstery and non-existent shocks. She walked to school or rode her bike. If it was a half day of school sometimes she rode her horse and Flower would be content to stand outside tethered to the bike rack and help the groundskeeper trim the grass until it was time to go home.

But she's in Pennsylvania now and this is the Beach Bus.

The infamous Beach Bus.

At first Mary Ann thought they were going to the actual ocean – the even more infamous Jersey shore - but when she expressed this notion everyone looked at her like she was simple. Oh, no, not New Jersey! Not _Dirty Jers_, as Gilligan's rambunctious brother Michael liked to call it. People from Pennsylvania only went through New Jersey to get to the shore or New York City. TheirBeach Bus went to themountains.

The Poconos, dotted with lakes that most people didn't know were there. Private and public, natural and man-made, some with beaches, some with docks, some with local teenage lifeguards who roll their eyes when city folk start screaming that a fish touched their foot.

Mary Ann slumped down in her seat, a little embarrassed. She hadn't seen a mountain until she was nineteen years old and flew over the Rockies on her way to Hawaii. And even then from the high altitude they barely looked like molehills.

Gilligan scooted down in the seat next to her, nudging her with his shoulder. "It's almost as good as the ocean," he whispered, blue eyes twinkling. Mary Ann knew he was anxious to get back to the water after spending the first half of the summer trapped in landlocked Kansas with a rowdy group of Summerses.

Gilligan's pal Billy Maguire drives the Beach Bus now, a coveted position handed down from father to son in the community. He's less stern than old Mr. Maguire, but is revered by everyone all the same. He's proud of this honorable position, but he's also Gilligan's buddy, which automatically means he's goofy and childlike and totally lovable. The children on the bus, younger ones with parents or siblings and older ones with their friends who are entrusted to his care for the day, all respect him. The Beach Bus driver holds all the power over whether you get back home at the end of the day or not. Cross him and he'll leave you on a random street corner.

He's only ever had to do that once. The other kids didn't know that the troublemaker had a grandmother who lived a block away and Billy had planned the whole thing with her. But word spread about the kid who allegedly walked all the way home from the Poconos all by himself and no one stepped out of line after that.

Except the group of adults currently causing a ruckus in the back of his bus. The children who have the misfortune of sitting near them sigh pointedly, roll their eyes, purse their lips, meet Billy's eye in the mirror above the windshield to try to get him to do something about it. But he just laughs and yells things back at them and is a little jealous that he can't be part of the conversation.

Skinny Mulligan and Florence Oppenheimer sit in the seat in front of Gilligan and Mary Ann. Mary Ann smiles as she listens to them. They're talking about their kids, who they've left with Mrs. Gilligan and Michael's wife for the day. Their oldest, William, named after Skinny's best friend who was lost at sea, was suspended from school for putting ants under a girl's desk. Skinny thinks this is hilarious. Florence does not. Skinny pouts. Florence rolls her eyes. Skinny whines. Florence hands him a cookie from her purse. Skinny grins and kisses her on the cheek. They're an old married couple before they're old and Mary Ann smiles with envy.

Across the aisle from them, Gilligan's cousin Rudolph and his friend Claude are discussing redecorating something called a rumpus room. Rudolph wants orange shag carpet, but Claude won't entertain the notion. He crosses his arms and sticks his nose in the air.

Gilligan's sister Bridget sits with her husband Dean behind them. They quietly make fun of Rudolph and Claude behind their backs, imitating the way they sit, their mannerisms, and Bridget crosses her arms and sticks her nose in the air only half a second after Claude does. Bridget is much more proficient at this than her husband – doing uncanny impressions must run in the Gilligan family. Dean is barely keeping up, spending more time peering at his reflection in the window than he is helping his wife make fun of their friends. Dean smirks, his chiseled jaw twitching, and he grins. He winks at himself in the window and Bridget punches him in the shoulder just like Aunt Martha.

Dean Flanagan still can't get over himself.

Fatso Flanagan. It's amazing what a few weights and some salads will do.

Bridget leans over to kiss her husband and her brothers react. Loudly. Michael makes obscene gagging sounds and pretends to lose his lunch in the aisle. Gilligan sticks his tongue out and screws his eyes shut and curls up in his seat, burying his face in Mary Ann's shoulder. She laughs and pats his cheek sympathetically.

When Gilligan first heard that his sister was engaged to one of his best friends he nearly fainted in the kitchen of his apartment in Hawaii. He stayed lucid, but his mother's voice screamed up from the floor where he had dropped the phone.

Gilligan recovers slightly and cautiously lifts only his eyes over Mary Ann's shoulder. She smirks at him and kisses his forehead. "Are you okay?"

He nods, then grins at the sounds coming from his brother across the aisle, followed closely by their sister screeching at him and the loud thump of her smacking him.

Gilligan twists around and slides his knees up the back of the seat in front of them. He burrows down next to Mary Ann until the rest of the bus disappears behind the plastic seat. "How d'you like the Beach Bus?"

He's grinning at her expectantly and she giggles. "It's beautiful."

"It's just like old times. Except Bridget and Fatso weren't married." Gilligan grimaces.

"I think they're sweet. They're in love." When Gilligan sticks his tongue out again and retorts with a 'blech,' Mary Ann has to add, "Like us."

This stops him and he frowns slightly. A faint blush creeps up his neck. He stares at her hand resting on his leg, the pearl engagement ring he made her on the island glinting in the sun.

Mary Ann scoots over, her knees up in the seat next to his, and kicks his swinging foot. He glances up at her and smiles. "Yeah. Like us."


	3. Arrival

When the Beach Bus finally jerks to a stop, it does so with such force that it sends Mary Ann sliding out of her seat and into the dark abyss. Her arms fly up and she manages to keep herself from getting wedged between the seats. As she emerges, disheveled and pushing her hair back into place, she sees that the kids have already all fled the hot confines of the bus and their shrieks of glee waft back in through the open windows.

Gilligan has already collected all of their belongings and is waiting for her in the aisle. She brushes herself off and follows Florence toward the front of the bus.

"I'm sorry, Gilligan, but that bus ride is at least worth the Atlantic Ocean. I'm not sure how a lake could compare. This better be a really spectacular because I -."

Gilligan stops behind her, arms laden with their belongings, and grins at her. Mary Ann has frozen, wide-eyed, staring at the vista before her. "Oh, Gilligan," she breathes. She takes two steps forward, the small stones that pave the parking lot crackling underfoot. The rest of the passengers of the Beach Bus are descending the wooden stairs to their left, carefully maneuvering bags, chairs, and coolers from the parking lot to the beach. The kids are already running along the beach below, looking for the perfect spot to set up camp. Skinny yells from halfway down the stairs and a bunch of kids jump and vacate what is allegedly the Mulligans' personal patch of sand.

Gilligan grins at Mary Ann. It's ten degrees cooler here and the breeze ruffles her bangs, pushing her pigtails to one side, their ribbons fluttering gently. Before her and below her lays a large glittering blue lake. People are swimming, fishing, and, further out, boating. On the opposite shore, a dense forest begins at the shoreline and extends back as far as she can see. A small man-made beach is below them, the sand quickly turning into trees, amongst which is nestled a bath house, picnic tables, a swing set, and a covered pavilion, which has its shades drawn today.

"It's no tropical island, but -."

"It's beautiful." Mary Ann closes her eyes and inhales deeply. "It smells … like Christmas."

Gilligan grins wider. "Pine trees." He turns and looks out over the scene. "It's exactly the same."

"Did you come here a lot?"

"All the time. I learned to swim here."

Mary Ann turns her gaze back to the lake. "It's beautiful."

"You haven't seen anything yet."


End file.
